Who

The high-profile former creative director of Gucci is now the creator of Tom Ford fragrances as well as a stratospherically expensive eponymous menswear line.

Backstory

Ford was born in Austin, Texas but he spent his formative years in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he was raised by real estate broker parents. After dropping out of NYU in his freshman year and heading to LA to try acting, he returned to New York and enrolled at Parsons, landing his first fashion jobs in the late 1980s at Cathy Hardwick and Perry Ellis, where he worked under Marc Jacobs. In 1990, Gucci's creative director Dawn Mello recruited Ford to move to Milan and design the company's womenswear line. He was made creative director in 1994 and hired French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld (then a mere stylist) and photographer Mario Testino to style and shoot a sexed-up ad campaign for the label. Critics decried Gucci's slinky new look as "porno chic," but it was a major commercial success (a step up from the late '80s, when Gucci had neared bankruptcy).

In 2000, the Gucci group acquired Yves Saint Laurent and named Ford creative director. His work for the two labels paid off—while European consumers decried the fact that a gauche American had taken over YSL, Ford's designs caused the label's sales to jump 150 percent in his first year. But in 2004, he shocked the fashion world by leaving Gucci, with chief executive Domenico De Sole in tow, to pursue his own projects, including writing movie scripts. After an unsuccessful attempt to get a foothold in the film business, Ford returned to the fashion marketplace in 2005, this time with his own brand. He started with accessories and fragrance lines, partnering with Estée Lauder on perfumes like Black Orchid. In fall 2007, Ford finally debuted a duplex Madison Avenue flagship store for his eponymous menswear line, and the following spring he was named menswear designer of the year by the CFDA.

Of note

Ford took Gucci, a dowdy brand stuck in the past, and shook up its old fashioned image. Amping up the label's sex appeal, he introduced skintight pants, boob-baring tops, and stiletto heels, and infamously unveiled a print ad featuring a woman pulling down her underwear to reveal her pubic hair meticulously shaved into the company's signature "G." He's continued to shock and titillate with the marketing of his own brand: Ads for the men's cologne line, shot by Terry Richardson, included an image of a woman holding a perfume bottle between her oiled breasts, and of a bottle resting in her bare crotch. One shot, in which a bottle of perfume was nestled in a gentleman's hairy ass crack, was deemed a little too graphic. (Ford explained that the scent is supposed to smell like ball sweat.) Naturally, he has bigger plans in the works, including more freestanding Tom Ford shops like the one in New York, where customers can shell out for dress shirts in 350 colors, top hats, diamond cuff links, and even custom suits starting at the low-low price of $5,000. (When shoppers get fatigued from excessive shopping, they can have one of the store's butlers or maids—all of whom are also models—fetch them lunch.) He's also launching in-store boutiques within Bergdorf Goodman's and Neiman Marcus and intends to have 100 of these outposts operating worldwide by 2017.

In person

Never one to shy away from the spotlight, Ford has always made himself the centerpiece of his brand, whether at Gucci or his own company. According to his unfortunate underlings, he's difficult to work with—it's rumored that when he's at the Estée Lauder offices, he even dictates what the staff wears to meetings with him (no colored socks, please). Ford was also apparently a terror while at work on Vanity Fair's March 2006 issue, the controversial "all nude" edition which he guest-edited (and stepped in to pose on the cover with naked stars Kiera Knightley and Scarlett Johansson after Rachel McAdams demurred). Ford was reportedly so finicky about which designers' clothes he'd include in the issue that magazine staffers started cutting the labels out of the clothes before he could inspect them.

Personal

Despite marketing himself as a lothario, Ford claims to be monogamous with his partner of over 20 years, former Vogue Homme editor-in-chief Richard Buckley, who is 14 years his senior.

Habitat

Ford splits his time between six abodes: an apartment in New York, an apartment in Paris, a home in Austin, Texas, a 1920s-era mansion in Los Angeles, a 24,000-acre property in New Mexico, and a townhouse in London with suede walls and beaver-fur carpeting. His home in the New Mexico desert seems to be closest to his heart—it includes a 16,000-square-foot compound designed by architect Tadao Ando, with a horse stable and a mausoleum where he and Buckley intend to be buried. (To ensure they travel to the afterlife in style, Ford had matching rosewood and granite sarcophagi designed for the couple.) When in New York, Ford lives at the Carlyle Hotel and is usually accompanied by his two fox terriers, Angus and John.

No joke

Ford says he purchased his first pair of Gucci loafers at the age of 12.